1- It takes a lot of space. jUsT bUy a bIgGeR dRiVe --stfu I’m not going to spend money for you to waste it

1- a) Everyone assumes you’re an American with 20Gbps symmetrical fiber optic. My internet can’t handle 2+ Gb downloads for a fucking 50 Mb app bro

2- Duplicate graphics drivers. Particularly painful with Nvidia

3- It puts a lot of security work with distro library trees straight into the shitter

4- Horrendously designed system for CLI apps (flatpak run org.whocares.shit.app)

5- Filesystem isolation has many upsides for security but also it can cause some pain (definitely nitpicking)

• overly verbose way to launch them in terminal
• can sometimess not even respect your gtk/qt theming
• sandboxing/permission system can lead to you trying to figure out which directory you need to give access to when you want to save file if it wasn’t preconfigured
• uses its own libraries and not system libraries, want to play the hit new AAA game with steam flatpak? get fucked it requires a mesa commit that was merged 8 hours a go and you’re stuck on 23.0.4 and can’t use the git release.

Flatpak probably has it’s specific uses like trying to use one piece of proprietary software that you don’t trust and don’t want to give it too much access to your system, or most GUI software clients having an easy way to install Discord on your Steam Deck (no terminal usage, Linux is easy yay), but native packages 99% of the time work better.

Yes, I love it and don’t get me wrong but there are many downsides and they all result from poor planning and/or bad decisions around how flatpak was built. Here are a few:

• Poor integration with the system: sometimes works against you and completely bypasses your system instead of integrating with it / using its features better. To me it seems more like the higher levels are missing pieces to facilitate communication between applications (be it protocols, code or documentation) and sometimes it is as simple as configuration;
• Overhead, you’ll obviously end up with a bunch of copies of the same libraries and whatnot for different applications;
• No reasonable way to use it / install applications offline. This can become a serious pain point if you’re required to work in air gapped systems or you simply want to level of conservation for the future - it doesn’t seem reasonable at all to have to depend on some repository system that might gone at some point. Note that they don’t provide effective ways to mirror the entire repository / host it locally nor to download some kind of installable package for what you’re looking for;
• A community that is usually more interested in beating around the bush than actually fixing what’s wrong. Eg. a password manager (KeePassXC) and a browser (Firefox/Ungoogled) both installed via flatpak can’t communicate with each other because developers seem to be more interested in pointing fingers on GitHub than fixing the issue.

Flatpak acts as a restrictive sandbox experience that is mostly about “let’s block things and we don’t care about anything else”. I don’t think it’s reasonable to have situations like applications that aren’t picking the system theme / font without the user doing a bunch of links or installing more copies of whatever you already have. Flatpak in general was a good ideia, but the system integration execution is a shame.

There is some drawback. The main one : app can’t communicate with each other.

Example firefox and his extension keepass. As keepass can’t communicate with firefox, you have to open both apps and switch their windows.

You can use flatseal to manage communication between apps but that’s not an easy process and may prove a security issue if you don’t understand the technical jargon.

I’ve used flatpak for a while because it’s the default ob Fedoras GUI Software Center, but I’ve recently switched back to dnf and native packages where I can.

The thing is, that I have a shitty 500GB SSD with a shitty 50Mbit Internet connection (which is closer to 30Mbit because my house still has lead cables instead of copper). So downloading 300+ MB of libraries for a 2MB Program is just not feasible for me.

As a basic end-user I have not been too happy with my experience with flatpaks. I do appreciate that I can easily setup and start using it regardless of what distro I’m using. But based on standard usage using whatever default gui “app store” frontends that usually come with distros, it tends to be significantly slower than apt, for instance, and there seems to be connection problems to the repos pretty often as well.